Washington yesterday launched a harsh accusation against Beijing. He did not directly impute responsibility for the pandemic to him, but he was close. The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, said in statements to Fox that the federal bureau of investigations has believed “for a long time” that “most likely” is that the origin of the covid is “a possible incident in a laboratory in Wuhan” , China. And he added: “We are talking about “a possible leak in a laboratory controlled by the Chinese government that killed millions of Americans.”
The serious statement, later made official through a tweet from the federal agency itself, reinforces the much less forceful report that the Department of Energy had released over the weekend in a leak to the Wall Street Journal, another outlet from the ultra-conservative Murdoch group. The study maintained the same thesis of the leak from the Wuhan laboratory, but was based on intelligence information classified as “low confidence”, that is, highly uncertain.
A total of eight agencies of the Joe Biden Administration try to find out the original source of the coronavirus in its 2019 version. And they do not agree. Four of them reject the theory of escape and favor that of natural causes. Two have not taken a position. And only the FBI and Energy defend rather the possibility of the laboratory incident.
As long as the international scientific community, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the theory of natural cause through exposure to an infected animal prevails
But, despite the weakness of that previous report from the Department of Energy, all the major US media echoed it and different government spokespersons took advantage of its dissemination to blame Beijing for “lack of transparency” or “honesty” at the time. to investigate the primary cause of the pandemic. And all of this despite the recognition that other government agencies, if not most, questioned the accidental leak theory.
In his interview on Tuesday night with Fox, the FBI chief made a clearly incriminating “remark” against the Xi Jinping Executive, referring to an alleged obstruction of Washington’s investigations into the genesis of the covid: “It seems to me that the Chinese government,” he said, “has been doing everything possible to try to frustrate and obfuscate the work here… and that’s unfortunate for everyone.”
Neither the political speculations nor the scientific arguments about this possible laboratory accident are exactly new. They date from the first moments of the spread of the virus throughout the world.
What is different now is the context in which Washington’s insinuations or veiled accusations against Beijing occur: days after the Chinese spy balloon incident was detected and shot down in US airspace and at the time that Biden’s team insists that Beijing they are considering sending arms to Russia for the war with Ukraine and preparing their own army for the possible invasion of Taiwan.
Bilateral tension is on the rise. The relationship between the two countries is on fire, and the FBI has just added fuel to that fire.
